The five-year grant is one of 10 NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards given this year. The Pioneer Award, established in 2004, challenges investigators at all career levels to develop innovative approaches that have the potential to produce a high impact on a broad area of biomedical or behavioral research.

News and Information

OSP Urges Early Submission for Proposals with Oct. 5 Deadline

The Office of Sponsored Projects encourages researchers who plan to submit a proposal between now and Oct. 5, 2012 to work early with their proposal specialists. Please submit a Proposal Review Form as early as possible.

There are two major concerns for this deadline, especially those submitting to the Public Health Service (PHS)

The week leading up to Oct. 5 will see a peak in proposal activity. Submitting early will ensure proposals are submitted on time to the funding agency.

Those who are submitting grants to Public Health Service (PHS) agencies must satisfy the requirements of the updated PHS Conflict of Interest policy. Namely, all covered individuals listed on the project must complete a two-fold process before proposal submission: Complete training; and Submit a Financial Information Disclosure form. PHS requires that all covered individuals must have completed training AND submitted a financial disclosure form before an application can be submitted.

Research Funding Available

Funding is available for 2012-2013 Special Research Grants. Also, nominations for the Hamilton Book Award competition are being accepted.

SPECIAL RESEARCH GRANTS for 2012-2013 in amounts up to $750 are awarded to tenured and tenure-track faculty throughout the year until funds are expended. Applications are being accepted.

HAMILTON BOOK AWARDS PROGRAM is accepting all books, including scholarly monographs, creative works (e.g., novels and anthologies of poetry), exhibition catalogues, textbooks, and edited collections published in calendar year 2012 by university faculty and staff. Deadline is Jan. 18, 2013.

Quoted-UT Researchers in the News

(In an article about board members at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Francie Ostrower, professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, commented on what members of such boards need to know to be effective.)

Francie Ostrower, a University of Texas professor who studies how cultural organizations function, says her own research on nonprofit boards has shown that such a feeling matters a great deal.

"We found that … one of the strongest things boards can do is be very clear about what's expected [of members] and hold them to it but also to give opportunities to feel they can participate and make a difference. You can have a gamut — people so dedicated to an organization that they eat, live and breathe it, and others who aren't going to do that much."

The research objective of this project is to explore the feasibility of utilizing the emerging computational intelligence discipline of artificial immune systems (AIS) in the realm of diagnostics in high-speed trains. The proposed research will catalyze a strong research collaboration between Djurdjanovic's team at UT Austin and Noureddine Zerhouni's team at the FEMTO-ST Institute of the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France.

The researchers will leverage prior achievements of the UT team in AIS-inspired diagnostics and ongoing research by the French team in the area of predictive maintenance of TGV trains. The team will explore the mechanisms of generation and distribution of "immunity carriers" across various subsystems of a TGV train, as well as the interaction mechanisms between the immunity carriers and the monitored system that would lead to precedent-free isolation of subsystems that behave abnormally. The term precedent-free pertains to the ability to deal with anomalies that were not foreseen during the design stage and for which fault models or training data do not exist. Such capability will be analogous to the biological systems ability to detect and isolate antigens (viruses, bacteria) that have never been encountered before. In the final weeks of the project, the team will devise a follow up proposal that will aim at deepening our understanding and perfecting the AIS paradigm in high-speed rail (HSR) systems.

The Research Alert is an electronic publication from the Office of the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin. It includes news of research honors and awards, news of research programs and deadlines, researchers quoted in news media, a listing of funding opportunities and a look at a current research project. It is available by e-mail and on the Web.